Why do people have different accents?

Answer

If you think for example 200 years or more ago , there were no communication aids like radio or telephone , no-one travelled much unless they really needed to , and so there were many variations in language . In the same country people from one village or town or tribe , could possibly live their whole lives and never visit the ajoining town . Different expressions developed and wide variations in slang existed across a whole country .

This still happens today in some remote places such as southern France near the Pyrenean mountains , where some people still speak a dialect which is more like Spanish than French . Likewise on the other side of the mountains , there is an area

where they speak an different version of Spanish.......Although a country may be under one flag , it does not erase the differences in language which have existed over many years .

In a fairly small country like England , there are wide variations today in dialect and accent , and it can happen that a person from one end of the country has a problem understanding someone from the opposite end , although they can guess from their accent , whereabouts they were brought up .

The language which we first learn as children from our parents and family becomes deeply embedded in each of us , and is always detectable in the way we say certain words , although we may have moved to another part of the country or even a new country as we grew up .

Learning a new language is always very difficult , as you have to modify or extend how you think of every word you know......learning a new spelling is hard enough but you also have to learn how to pronounce these new words correctly ...

It can take a matter of years to perfect pronounciation, a decade before somebody could pass off as a foreigner, and succeed. The difficulty of such an achievement is due to the subtle variations in the pronunciation of word components, these variations are so deeply rooted in our minds that it takes a lot of effort to be able to switch between them when speaking different languages, thereby producing accents in the people unable to do so.

As a person born in England myself , I find it quite amusing that friends I have from Holland and Sweden speak English , with what is to me , an obvious United States accent . This must be because their teacher at school was an American or they have watched an awful lot of American television programmes in English .

With the progess in communications , first radio and then television , a standard form of a particular language is used predominately . Newreaders(newscasters) and other announcers and presenters are typically chosen because they possess a 'standard' accent which is acceptable or understandable by most of the country . Interestingly this does not seem to have changed the regional accents , which have not disappeared . Instead people are aware of alternate pronounciations which they can use at will....... often for fun to impersonate someone else .

First answer by ID3485448980. Last edit by RobinJC. Contributor trust: 7 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 13 [recommend question]